Professor Bagchi is using MSI for his research investigating genetics in breast cancer. He was recently interviewed by the College of Biological Sciences (CBS) about his work with students who are discovering the excitement of doing research and making discoveries. The interview can be found on the CBS-Connect blog.

The University of Minnesota’s Center for Sustainable Polymers (CSP) announced last week that it has been awarded a $20 million grant from the National Science Foundation. The grant, which extends over five years, will fund research into the next generation of biobased plastics. The CSP is one of only eight NSF Centers for Chemical Innovation in the country.

UPDATE (posted August 19, 2014): The demo license was extended until September 17. Contact Evan Bollig (boll0107@umn.edu) to participate in the demo.

MSI has deployed a demo of the MATLAB Distributed Compute Server (MDCS), which allows MATLAB jobs to launch parfor and SIMD loops across multiple nodes on Itasca. With MDCS there is no need to run pbsdsh or another parallel shell environment to span nodes. Also, jobs can be interactive or batched, and are controlled from within the MATLAB UI. More information about the software can be found on the MathWorks website.

MSI users are invited to test this demo and provide feedback. Please email Evan Bollig at boll0107@umn.edu to get a settings file and instructions if you wish to participate. The demo license expires on August 24, and MATLAB jobs running on Itasca will burn SUs at the standard rate of 1.5 CPU hours per SU scaled by the size of your job. (So, using this demo assumes you have enough SUs.) The demo has a 256 concurrent process limit (i.e., 32 nodes), shared by all users.

Your feedback and interest will help MSI decide whether the MDCS is worth pursuing. We would also like to know the upper limit on job size that you need.

Due to utility construction in the MSI data center, the monthly maintenance day for August will be held on August 20. Because of this late date, there will be no downtime for September. After the August maintenance day, the next scheduled downtime will be on October 1.

Details about the August maintenance downtime will be sent out on August 15.